As Madison Goes, So Goes The Nation

There are a lot of story lines to what is happening in Madison,
Wisconsin. There's a political narrative: Republicans are
trying to de-fund the Democratic party's most reliable source of
campaign funds and support. There's a fiscal narrative: the
government is broke and taxpayers can no longer afford the lavish
benefits and pensions that public sector workers have won over
years of collective bargaining. There's a governance
narrative: elections have consequences. And there's a human
narrative: people who are by no means wealthy are staring down
the barrel of a lower standard of living.

Joe Klein, the veteran political analyst and Time
magazine columnist,
sees Madison as a metaphor for what is going on all around
the country:

The teachers, especially, became a reactionary force when it came
to school reform — opposing charter schools (in Detroit, the
union blocked a $125 million private contribution to build five
new charter schools) and merit pay; they lashed themselves to
strict seniority rules more appropriate to assembly-line workers
than would-be professionals. New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg has been trying to negotiate a deal whereby layoffs, if
necessary, would not be made on a last-hired, first-fired basis.
"So you'd rather have them lay off the more experienced
teachers?" a Wisconsin teacher asked me. No: teachers should be
hired and fired and paid according to their ability. "But who
judges that?" the teacher asked. Their employers do, I replied.
The teacher scoffed; the idea that school principals should be
able to decide who should be part of their workforce seems
incomprehensible to most teachers — and yet that sort of
accountability is at the heart of any system that aspires to
excellence.

The strongest arguments against public employees' unions lie
there: in their power to block reform and strangle good
governance. Clearly, there needs to be a rebalancing of pension
and health care benefits that puts public employees more in line
with the conditions that prevail in the private sector. But those
changes must be accompanied by the recognition that a great many
public employees are severely underpaid. This is especially true
at the federal level, where the scientists testing drugs at the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the bank regulators at the
SEC could probably double their salaries by sliding into the
private sector. And it's also true at the very bottom of the wage
scale, for the school-bus drivers and home health care workers.

The best rationale for the continued existence of public
employees' unions is to create wage floors for such workers. But
the unions have set about, largely unimpeded, to build walls
(work rules) that constrict government innovation and ceilings
(like opposition to merit pay) that make it less likely that the
most talented professionals will remain in public service.